The Express campaign is aimed at the gullible. The misleading framing suggests a large number of "desperate farmers" making a "last-ditch plea" against a "hated levy" that threatens farms handed down through the generations.
Bullshit.
The UK has around 209,000 farm holdings. The government estimates that just 185 estates claiming farm relief will pay more inheritance tax this year, which is fewer than one in a thousand.
Around 85% of estates claiming the relief will pay nothing extra. The first £2.5m of farm and business assets is tax-free, so a couple can pass on £5 MILLION. Anything above that is taxed at 20%, half the normal rate, and the bill can be spread over ten years interest-free.
The copy appears to credit Andy Burnham with the "partial climbdown". The threshold was actually raised from £1m to £2.5m in December 2025, under Starmer and Reeves.
Until April 2026, farmland could be passed on free of inheritance tax at any value. Most of that benefit went to wealthy landowners rather than working farmers. Fewer than half of those who claimed it had earned anything from farming in the five years before they died. Just 117 estates took 40% of the total value of the relief.
Even under the original, lower threshold, independent researchers found that 86% of affected farm estates could pay the bill from other assets without selling any land.
The two farmers quoted are presented as ordinary voices. Both are leading campaigners. Olly Harrison describes growing his land from 180 acres to over 1,500, runs a business with 14 income streams and a popular YouTube channel, and helped organise the 2024 Westminster rally. He has said inheritance tax should be scrapped for everyone, which goes well beyond farms. Martin Williams farms 800 hectares in Herefordshire and is a former county NFU chair. In 2025 he said the wealthy should pay their fair share and that £1m was too low.
The threshold has since been raised two and a half times, and he now wants the tax scrapped.
The page follows a familiar pattern, which the linguist Teun van Dijk calls the ideological square: talk up our side's virtues, talk up the other side's faults, and leave out anything that complicates the picture. The label does the rest. Call it a "family farm tax" and you have half-won the argument before giving a single figure.
A small number of working farms with little cash do face real bills, and they deserve a targeted fix. The Express offers something else: a tax on 185 mostly large estates, presented as an attack on the family.